Telematics applications provide a variety of services via telecommunication devices with the purpose of controlling, providing information to or receiving information from remote objects. The field of vehicle telematics relates to the special scenario in which the remote objects are vehicles.
It is well known that many telecommunication services are based on context information indicative of the current environment in which a particular telecommunication device, such as a mobile terminal, is used. From a passenger's perspective, traveling in vehicle is a very definite context, and passengers could thus benefit from ubiquitous services, including telecommunication services, that are aware of this context.
There has been an approach to correlate passengers' mobile terminals and vehicles by installing a dedicated device into a vehicle, which device would connect (e.g., using short distance radio communication) to any mobile terminal in the vehicle, and broadcast an identifier to these “on-board” mobile terminals. Later on, both the vehicle device and the mobile terminals would communicate the same identifier to the network, so the network can make a correlation using this identifier. Communicating these ‘vehicle’ identifiers to the network by the terminals would require significant software (and possibly hardware) impact on the terminals, and also might impact 2-4G (2nd to 4th generation) signaling protocol standards.
Moreover, other existing correlation solutions rely on either manual interaction, ad ministration from the passenger's side (e.g., installing applications on mobile terminals, or pairing their terminals with in-vehicle Bluetooth™ devices) or some sort of other special devices used or carried by the passengers or installed in the vehicles, which devices need to communicate with the passengers' mobile terminals.
However, these special requirements, especially manual interactions and the impact on the mobile terminals, limit the spread and applicability of any service that would benefit from or rely on context information indicative of a traveling vehicle.